Blissful ignorance. That’s what it is to go through life unaware that people around you – walking down the sidewalk, parked next to you at McDonalds, living in an apartment just down the street – are hungry.

Hunger leapt into the news this week when it became clear that the Trump administration would refuse to use some $6 billion in USDA contingency funds to pay SNAP nutrition benefits to recipients when regular funding for the program runs out on Saturday. You’ve probably seen the stories: USDA, in violation of the Hatch Act, incidentally, put up an intentionally false statement on its website that Democrats had “voted 12 times not to fund the food stamp program,” blaming the votes by Senate Democrats not to reopen the government on their wanting to “hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures” rather than provide food for hungry Americans. The Obamacare supplements that Democrats are holding out to keep funded have nothing to do with providing health care to “illegal aliens,” who are ineligible, or gender affirming care which is not covered by the Affordable Care Act.

Republicans just can’t help themselves. They make everything about immigration and “transexual for all,” as Trump continually calls anything having to do with any sort of departure from his executive order that there are only two genders, male and female, and fuck anyone who was born or believes differently.

It’s not about immigration and gender. It’s about hunger, and the fact is, if the USDA does not agree to follow the law and provide emergency funding for SNAP, or the Senate refuses to vote for an emergency bill that would fund the program, or if 23 states led by Democratic governors do not succeed with a lawsuit filed today that would force the expenditure of contingency funds for SNAP, 42 million Americans will fall into what is euphemistically called food insecurity on Saturday.

It’s not food insecurity. It’s hunger. About 16 million of those receiving SNAP benefits are children. Another 8.5 million are elderly, and about 4 million are adults with disabilities. Those people are among the 42 million who will begin going without adequate food on Saturday, or they will have to start making decisions about where they will cut their budget, like skipping rent or utilities, to leave money for food.

I’ve never gone hungry -- not as a child, not as a young adult, not in middle age, and not now as I cruise through my “senior” years. But it doesn’t take much trouble in one’s life to become one of those who experience the gnawing terror of not having enough to eat. You might get laid off from a job, you might not be able to find a job, you might get in a car accident and have injuries that prevent you from working, or you might have just gotten out of prison and don’t have a place to live or a way to make a living, or you might be elderly and on Social Security and run out of money near the end of the month after paying your rent and utilities and grocery bills earlier in the month.

Or you might be a soldier in the Army who is not paid enough to make rent and car and insurance and utility payments and have enough left over to buy warm winter clothing for your wife and children and yourself…and buy enough food for your family until your next payday.

That is indeed a thing. Lower ranking members of the armed services, especially if they are assigned to a military post that is in a high cost of living area like Washington D.C. or Los Angeles or even Kansas City or Chicago, are not paid enough to live on. They are eligible for SNAP and something called Family Subsistence Supplemental Allowance (FSSA) to help raise their income to 130 percent of the federal poverty level for the area in which they live.

That’s right: Military pay is low enough that it just barely reaches federal poverty levels in many areas of the country. A private first class in the army with less than 3 years’ service earns about $2,700 a month in base pay. A private with dependents – a wife or husband and children – also earns about $1,600 per month in housing allowance. The base pay for a private first class is just about equal to the federal poverty level in the area around the Pentagon in Northern Virginia. Miliary housing allowance pushes it over, but not by much.

When I was in the army in Colorado in 1969 and 1970, privates and other low-ranking enlisted men were paid just below and just over $100 a month. It was a different time. You could rent a trailer for $50 a month, an apartment for a little more than that. In my platoon, I had enlisted soldiers, most of whom had just returned from Vietnam, who had wives and one or two children who had to live off the post at Fort Carson and make do on that money. I had no idea how they were doing it. Every day, it got to be 5 p.m., they got in their cars and went home to their families.

I was a platoon leader, and as one of my extra duties, I was the mess officer in charge of the mess hall. One day, one of my cooks approached me after work. He had been a Hells Angel before being drafted and had belonged to a very rough chapter in Riverside, California, east of Los Angeles. His Hells Angels chapter, like many others, was in the illegal business of manufacturing and selling methamphetamine. He had a wife and child, lived in an apartment off post. That day, he told me his wife had left him and took their daughter, who was 2 or 3 years old, went back to Riverside, had linked up with his Angels chapter, and was now the “old lady” of a rival member who had become the head of the Angels chapter.

A friend had sent him a letter telling him that hepatitis was running through the chapter due to intravenous meth use. He was afraid his wife and child were going to come down with the disease. He was desperate to get them to come back to Colorado, but his wife wouldn’t listen to him. She was tired of living in poverty as the wife of a low-ranking cook in the army.

He asked me if I would call her and help talk her into coming back to Colorado Springs. That night, he came to the trailer where I lived just south of Fort Carson, and we called his wife. I can’t remember what I said to her on the phone, but somehow, I talked her into returning to her husband. She agreed to take a Greyhound bus from Riverside back to Colorado, but neither she or her husband had the money for a ticket. The next morning, the cook and I went to Western Union, and I wired her $25 for a bus ticket.

A few days later, she was back in Colorado, living with the soldier in their rundown apartment off post. To thank me for helping him, the soldier, by now a corporal, invited me to dinner at their apartment. I showed up to find that the menu being served was exactly the same as the one in the mess hall that day – chicken and potatoes and canned green beans. The dishware and tableware was military-issue, “borrowed” from the mess hall, as was the food he had cooked.

That was the way they were making it. I discovered that the mess sergeant was running a loosely organized food theft system. He would take surplus food from the day’s menu – there was always more than enough to feed the company – and sell it off the mess hall loading dock to guys with families – 10 cents for a chicken, a dime for a small sack of potatoes, a dime for a #10 tin can of beans or peas. Most of the guys in the company who were married and living off post were feeding their families that way.

This was 1969. That year, there was a revision of the law in the food stamp program. I saw a story in the paper about the way the program had changed, and the story gave me an idea. A few days after the “borrowed” dinner at my cook’s apartment, I drove him and a couple of other guys down to the food stamp office in Colorado Springs and signed them up for the program. I remember exactly how it worked. At that time, recipients paid in cash for an amount of food stamps that was a multiple of their payment. My cook, with a wife and a child and an army income around $100 per month, paid $20 in cash and received five times that amount in food stamps, nearly as much as he earned in the army.

Over a period of a couple of weeks, I drove a dozen guys in my platoon down to the food stamp office and signed them up. A sergeant in my platoon who had three kids got more than his pay in food stamps. Word spread. Other lieutenants started to do the same with their platoons.

I had a rather grim meeting with the mess sergeant and told him that selling surplus food to the troops every evening was over. From then on, one of the cooks, on a rotating basis, would hand out surplus fresh and canned food every other day or so from the loading dock. On days fried chicken was on the menu, the army would supply us with 80 fresh chickens for a company of about 125 soldiers. Sometimes, we would have 20 left over, sometimes 10.

We distributed it all. I had 12 guys in my platoon on food stamps. Other platoons had a similar number. The word got out that a third of the company was receiving food stamps, and I was behind it. I got called in by the brigade commander. Having soldiers on food stamps was not a good look for his brigade. It was “bringing discredit on the army,” he told me. He ordered me to disenroll the guys from the food stamp program.

By that time, I had looked up the regulations. There it was, spelled out in federal-ese. They were eligible. I told the colonel that discredit on the army came from hungry soldiers with hungry families.

I got a mark against me on my record, that already had more than a few such marks. But we didn’t have any hungry families of soldiers in my platoon or the other platoons in the company.

The food stamp program back then, and the SNAP program today, is one of the best things this country has ever done. It didn’t end hunger, but it made a big dent. Having enough to eat should be a right, not a privilege. From the window over my writing desk, I can see a small food pantry cabinet run by the Methodist Church across the street. Every day, I see cars drive up, and I watch people get out and stock the cabinet with cans and boxes of pasta and rice and other nonperishables. I watch cars drive up and people get out and take an armful of cans or boxes and drive away.

The parade of cars and people and cans and boxes of food, and back in Washington D.C., the SNAP program, even with its struggles, amount to living proof that this country has a soul. Even with all its struggles, that soul is a good one.

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He does it every day, often several times a day. He’s walking out to his Marine helicopter, or he has reporters into the Oval Office while some president or prime minister is visiting, or he gives a speech like the one in Quantico a couple of weeks ago, and he says something or he does something that gets a headline because it’s outrageous and unprecedented and sometimes there are Constitutional consequences.

Today on Air Force One during his Asia trip, Trump once again “mused,” as the mainstream media calls it, about seeking a third term. He did the same thing last February, and in March, and after telling NBC News that “a lot of people” were asking him about it, he said he “was not joking.” It’s in the Constitution that he cannot serve a third term. He may think “his” Supreme Court will help him out, but mostly, he wants us to worry and get depressed that somehow, it might happen.

But it isn’t just his trolling or baiting the media. It’s everything else, and I mean everything. It seems not a day goes by that there isn’t another horror. Over the weekend, he had the USDA announce about the SNAP program on its website that “the well has run dry” and “there will be no benefits issued on November 1.”

That is not true. By law, the Department of Agriculture must maintain a reserve to pay SNAP benefits during times that there are unusual stresses on the system, and there is $6 billion sitting there in the treasury for just that purpose.

But the “law” doesn’t matter to Trump, and that is another part of his despair campaign. The Supreme Court unleashed the maniac with its decision in Trump v. United States, and he takes full advantage every time he can.

Let’s run down just what he’s done recently. He demolished a third of the White House without going through the mandated process, not just for federal buildings owned by the taxpayers, but for the White House itself. His Department of Defense shot yet another so-called “drug boat” out of the water without providing even a scrap of evidence that the boat was carrying drugs or headed for the United States. He has denied emergency federal funds to two counties in a blue state, Maryland, while providing the same sort of aid to red states, and he came right out and said that was why he was doing it. He is attempting to send National Guard troops from the state of Texas to two states where they have no business being, Illinois and Oregon. His deployment of masked federal “agents,” who refuse to show their identities, to arrest and deport undocumented migrants has inevitably rounded up U.S. citizens in their dragnets and denied them their rights under the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution.

He threw a tantrum over a television ad aired in Canada that accurately used footage of Ronald Reagan criticizing tariffs, and he restarted an already insane trade war with our ally by imposing yet another tariff on them. He ordered the movement of an aircraft carrier group from halfway across the world to the waters off Venezuela, obviously in contemplation of an invasion of that country, just because he could do it.

Since taking office, he fired employees of the Department of Justice simply for doing their jobs when they prosecuted January 6 insurrectionists or worked on prosecutions run by Jack Smith. He has targeted his critics such as John Bolton and James Comey and ordered his attorney general to prosecute them. He has attacked law firms that have angered him by representing people whom he has declared his “enemies.” He has launched an assault on higher education by requiring colleges to change their hiring and admissions processes, and if they don’t do what he wants, he has cancelled their research funding.

There is nothing in the law that permits him to extort law firms or colleges or target critics with ginned-up prosecutions. In fact, all those things are a violation of the law, and he just does it.

And on and on and on it goes. I’m sure you could provide your own list of outrages. Here’s another one: his so-called “executive order” cancelling birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution.

Can he do it, any of it? The answer is, yes he can, and he has done all of it, and he is doing it not just to please his MAGA base, but to send his opponents into a downward spiral of despair.

I get the question from readers almost daily: What can we do? Well, I have a few answers that may not make you happy or satisfy you, but here they are.

The first thing is, don’t take the bait and fall into a depression that we are somehow losing our grip on this country. Bad shit is happening, but there have been 400 lawsuits filed in federal court to stop Trump from his attempts to throw out the law and the Constitution in his deployment of federal agents, the National Guard, his clearly illegal executive order cancelling birthright citizenship – I could go on. Federal judges have issued temporary restraining orders and criticized lawyers from Trump’s Department of Justice for incompetence and ignorance of judicial procedure and all manner of other failings.

There is a movement, or several movements, to overturn practically everything Trump has done or attempted to do.

We have taken to the streets in No Kings protests, millions of us, in solidarity with each other and with the rule of law and the Constitution. This is no small matter. The protests are not spontaneous, but they have no central organizing organization, and they are not concentrated just in big cities, but in hundreds of smaller cities and towns across the nation in every single state in the Union, including protests in red states.

Many of us may indeed feel a sense of despair when we wake up every morning. How could we not? But we are not sitting back and taking this shit. Trump is said to be preparing the ground to “steal” the midterm elections. But he is already fucking that up by telling people not to vote by mail. Republicans are going to lose upcoming elections in Virginia and New Jersey. People are angry that their votes are being manipulated in states where gerrymandering is being forced by Republican legislatures and governors, and organizing is already happening to counter these chickenshit attempts to rig elections for the House in the midterms.

I think there is one important thing that can be done that has not occurred yet but should happen immediately. Our former Presidents of the United States should get together, all of them, and not only join the resistance, but lead it. Barack Obama has been giving speeches. Yesterday, in a speech in Boston, Joe Biden made the kind of strong statement that all the former presidents should be making on a weekly basis. Biden said, “Since its founding, America served as a beacon for the most powerful idea ever in government in the history of the world. The idea is stronger than any army. We’re more powerful than any dictator.”

We are indeed. Bill Clinton should be out there giving speeches. So should George W. Bush. All our former presidents lived and served the American people in the White House that Donald Trump is now desecrating not only with his presence, but by tearing it down in a naked and illegal attempt to rebuild it as a monument to himself.

Do these men whom we elected want to be the former presidents of a former democracy? By all reports, each of them hates Donald Trump, even Bush. They hate what he is doing to our country. They should get together and make clear their opposition to what Trump has done and is doing to tear down not only the White House, but our Constitutional order.

Let this be a clarion call to Presidents Biden and Obama and Clinton and Bush. We need you. You were elected by your fellow citizens to lead us while you were in office. We need your leadership now more than ever.

They should step up, and so should we. Despair is not an option. We need to fight with every cell in our bodies. I am proud of this country. I am proud to be a citizen. I want my children to have a country of which they can be proud to be citizens. I am distressed, but I am not in despair. I’m going to fight — we’re going to fight — until our last breath for this country and our democracy.

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The question has arisen among sane people again and again over the last ten years: Who are these people?

I think I know. They’re yabbos, best described by what they are not. They’re not men. They’re not women. They are human beings, but only in the barest sense that they are of flesh and blood. Some examples are necessary. Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, who during the same week it became known that there will not be money for SNAP food assistance for poor people, decided that she would use taxpayer money to buy two ultra-luxurious Gulfstream jets for her department that cost $172 million. She’s not a woman. She’s a yabbo.

Meet Paul Ingrassia. He’s not a man. When he nominated Ingrassia to run the Office of Special Counsel, Donald Trump described him as a “highly respected attorney, writer, and Constitutional Scholar.” Ingrassia withdrew his name from the Senate confirmation process this week when it became known that he had texted on a Republican group chat, “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time,” and that the Martin Luther King holiday should “be tossed into the seventh circle of hell.” Paul Ingrassia, who still has a job in the White House, is a yabbo.

Who says that kind of stuff? Who called Black people “monkeys” and “watermelon people” and praised those who believe in slavery as a group of Young Republicans recently did in yet another group text? Yabbos, that’s who.

How else do you describe the people behind what is going on in this country right now? Their Maximum Leader, the yabbo who goes by Donald Trump, tore down the East Wing of the White House last week. I mean, the ground where it stood is now a level patch of dirt and the dust and dregs of construction debris. He intends to build in its place a monstrosity which he already calls the “Donald J. Trump Ballroom.” The thing, which has a footprint larger than the entirety of the rest of the White House, will seat 1,000 people and is shown in an architect’s rendering as festooned in gold leaf and marble and crystal chandeliers. He broke multiple laws when he leveled the East Wing. He did not seek Congressional approval and funding, as other presidents have done when they did renovations to the White House. Instead, he is paying for his Towering Tomfoolery with donations from billionaires whose companies do business with the U.S. government and who seek favor with Trump. For this, and many, many other reasons, he is a yabbo.

We have never, in this country, had National Guard soldiers from one state deployed to the streets of a city in another state against the wishes of that state’s governor and the city’s mayor, as Donald Trump is attempting to do with soldiers from Texas and other red states to the cities of Portland and Chicago, both of which have Democrats for mayors. Who does this? A Republican yabbo.

Are all yabbos Republicans? That is a good question. Has the Democratic Party ever had a president in office who took $130 million from one of his political supporters allegedly to “pay the troops” during a government shut down? In fact, this has never happened before, a civilian “donating” money to the government and dictating how that money should be used.

Has the Democratic Party ever elected a president who took upon himself the power to use drones and jet aircraft to shoot boats out of the water on his own say-so that they were carrying drugs that would “kill 25,000 Americans?”

Has a Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives ever refused to seat a member who was duly elected by the constituents of her district simply because if that member is seated, she will vote in a way that is unfavorable to the yabbo into whose ass the Speaker of the House has his nose inserted?

That has never happened. So much has never happened. Has a president, Democratic or Republican, ever unilaterally shut down an entire department of the United States government without Congressional authorization in the way Donald Trump shut down USAID? Remember what they did about two or three days after Trump was inaugurated? They dispatched a couple of workers with crowbars and screwdrivers and chisels and removed the words, United States Agency for International Development, from its headquarters building. Then they used U.S. Marshalls to keep the people who work there from entering the building.

We’ve forgotten so many terrible things that have transpired, because new terrible things, like the East Wing teardown have come along to replace them. I remember thinking when I saw the footage of the workers chiseling the name of the headquarters of USAID from its building that this was a terrible omen. It predicted something frightening: a Donald Trump unleashed from law and order and norms.

And that is where he went, and it’s where he has been throughout the first nine months of his presidency. Every day, something new and terrible happens. He has had cabinet meetings that resemble nothing less than a meeting of the North Korean politburo. So-called “leaders” of government agencies, one after another, rise from their places around the cabinet table and heap praise on the Yabbo In Chief. He is the greatest president who ever lived. He is brilliant. He is a God on earth. On and on they go. I wondered how otherwise apparently sane human beings such as Marco Rubio said those things to a man for whom he showed such contempt only a few years ago, and then I realized that it’s not Marco Rubio sitting at that cabinet table. It’s a yabbo.

That display two weeks ago when some 800 generals and admirals were forced to fly from their commands in distant lands to Quantico, Virginia, and sit there to be lectured by a strutting fool whom they all knew had tattooed Nazi symbols on his own body…those generals and admirals were not observing and listening to a man, they were in the presence of a yabbo, and it was all over their faces that they knew this.

One of the salient aspects of what we might call yabbodom is disrespect for precedent and norms of the law. The human beings who wrote the Constitution foresaw a country that would be governed by the set of laws they wrote down as a blueprint for a nation. Integral to that document, and to the intentions of the Founders, was the idea that the laws and norms written into the Constitution would be respected by leaders of the Executive and the Congress and the Judiciary established by the Constitution.

The Founders hoped that this would be the way a nation keeps itself going. You write laws, and you honor them, and you hold elections called for by the laws, and you respect the offices to which you have been entrusted, and you hold onto all of it because it is what establishes and keeps your legitimacy. The key to all of it, to keeping the Democratic Republic that has been established, is honoring the laws and holding tight to what they compel the branches of the government to do.

This has not happened. The Republican Party has appointed and confirmed members of the Supreme Court who have decided that laws which have been written by the Congress, and decisions that have been passed by previous Supreme Courts, can be ignored or changed at will. This has created chaos. There is now chaos in the land regarding women’s reproductive health and the way decisions are made to keep women healthy. There is chaos in the land about the right to vote, the most precious right conveyed upon citizens by the Constitution. There is chaos in the law because we have a president who has taken it upon himself to decide who must follow the law, and who is permitted to break the law.

This is why I believe that yabbos are now in charge. Donald Trump has decided that laws that were enforced by the previous president, Joe Biden, will not be enforced under his rule. He pardoned every one of the thousand-plus insurgents who were convicted of crimes for what they did on January 6, 2021, even the ones who beat and caused the death of police officers. Some of those who Trump freed have committed new crimes and have been charged and jailed and are headed back to prison.

He freed the man who was convicted and sentenced to a lifetime in prison for running the so-called “dark web” that provided a way to finance drug dealing and murder and other criminal activity.

He recently pardoned a crypto criminal who was convicted of running an enterprise that financed terrorism and the making and distribution of child porn. This man, the head of a company called Binance, used so-called “stable coins” produced by the Trump family crypto company called Liberty Financial to invest his own company’s holdings in bitcoin, yielding huge profits for Trump’s company.

This was a bribe. It is all the evidence we need that Donald Trump has decided that bribing him is legal, but possibly bribing someone else is illegal.

Trump has either frozen or cancelled some $28 billion that was scheduled to be spent on projects in states, cities, and counties run by Democrats. Among the projects is the new rail tunnel from Manhattan to New Jersey under the Hudson River. It has long been understood that so-called blue states run by and inhabited by Democrats contribute far more in tax dollars to the government than they receive in government benefits. Red states that produce less tax revenue are the beneficiaries of those blue state tax dollars. This was an odd but generally acceptable state of affairs until Donald Trump decided that the blue states will not be permitted to benefit from their own tax dollars, creating a vassal system of taxation without representation, yet another break with the democratic norms of the past.

Abandonment of laws and norms is not democracy. It mocks the Constitution and the principles upon which the country was founded. Men and women who are sane and who believe in the rule of law do not do this.

Who are these people, we have asked ourselves. They are not of the world we have known. They do not believe in the things citizens of a democracy believe in. We now live in a yabbocracy overseen by thieves for whom the rule of law that has held this country together for 249 years no longer exists. They are yabbos.

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On the longer time scale that we feel in nature, the violence of colonial capitalism seems almost fleeting. ‘Mother Nature will outlast all of this’, Barkandji man Woddy Harris told me, gesturing across his hometown of Wilcannia, two hours’ drive from Broken Hill, and which has a majority Barkandji population.

I wondered about this when, on a later visit, I attended a funeral at the Broken Hill cemetery. There, the Aboriginal wife of the white working-class man we mourned handed me a plastic rose. As instructed, I threw the rose into the grave, materially connecting me and the other mourners who did likewise, to his body.

That connection might almost last forever. The plastic rose will certainly take many hundreds of years longer than his body to decompose. It will probably outlast Creedon Street and all the gravestones in the cemetery. It will likely still be there under the ground when BHP is a lost memory. It may outlast even the stock exchanges that BHP and other mining enterprise have helped to succeed. Success seems an understatement, in fact: finance’s influence has sometimes exceeded the power wielded by governments and politicians, including American Presidents and UK Prime Ministers.

Some things are eternal, or near-enough, but that doesn’t necessarily make them nourish. In the moment, at the funeral, the plastic rose nourished something. Global petrochemicals, turned into plastic, were articulated in a moment of everyday life that Michel de Certeau would certainly have called ‘agency’. In this way of thinking, we would take heart from the ways the product of capitalist environmental contamination was translated into new meaning at the graveside, a logic that mirrored the world-class restaurant that produced touristic beauty on the old slag heap. The problem with this perspective is that it does nothing to end the production of plastic, nor the infection of soils, oceans and food with microplastics that poison us all. We might have to admit that the plastic rose, so simple and beautiful a gesture, also performs something akin to pollution.

These intersections of agency and structure, of meaning and matter are particularly noticeable at funerals, and in cemeteries, where small things accrue abundant significance and where each life, mourned, celebrated and remembered, also somehow represents us all. In the cemetery, the structures of big capital articulate not only with the everyday life that was the focus of de Certeau’s politics, but in everyday death. In everyday death, individual agency might pollute in the same moment that it nourishes. And the sheer inclusivity of death, universal as it is, embraces and celebrates working class activism on the same street as the Aboriginal families that the very same town pushed to the margins if not to die, at least to live materially close to the dead.

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I’ve been trying to make a point for a VERY long time that the soulless monsters on the right do not see themselves as monsters. They see themselves as heroes. No matter how cruel or sadistic or illegal their actions, they look in the mirror and never see a villain, only a hero, or, at worst, a victim.

I would very much like to disabuse them of that notion, and this article is for them.

Hey, buddy. Yeah, you in the body armor with the assault rifle, taser gun, pepper spray, smoke grenades, zip ties, and a love of Donald Trump and the white race.

You think you’re the good guy, don’t you?

Maybe you’re a warrior for Christ. Maybe you’re a soldier for the white race. Maybe you’re a patriot who hates baby-killing commies. A lot of you have conflated all of these into a Grand Unified Theory of Americanism where your pronouns are “U, S, and A” and Jesus personally signed the Declaration of Independence to defeat the Soviet Union.

Whatever story you tell yourself about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, I guarantee you think you’re the brave hero of this tale.

You are, after all, fighting the forces of darkness. Your enemy, the radical left, is filled with socialists and commies and Marxists.1 They’re Antifa and BLM and femininazis who murder babies after they’re born. They’re pedophiles and child traffickers and maybe even cannibals. They’re definitely controlled by The Jews “The Globalists.”

You are fighting against the armies of Satan himself.

How could you NOT be the glorious hero of this story? You are fighting the ultimate evil!

And since you are fighting evil in its purest form, you are unshackled by moral limits, right? It would be insane to worry about morality in a time like this! Or the rule of law. Or even basic human decency. You are fighting a war for the very future of America/humanity/God’s kingdom on Earth.

You can’t be concerned with rules of engagement or annoying questions like “Is this legal?” or “Is this right or wrong?” You are on a mission! You MUST win at all costs! And, honestly, the people you’re fighting aren’t even really people anyway. That means you can lie, cheat, and steal from them. You can assault them at will. Violence is your ally. Rape and murder are tools to defeat the ultimate evil. They’re not crimes or sins! You’re the hero of the story!

At least, that’s what you keep telling yourself.

But when you get up in the morning and get ready for another day of violence, you cover your face and you hide your badge so no one can see your name. And you attack reporters and anyone with a camera.

Because deep down, you know you’re not the hero. You’re not even the villain. You’re just a cancer poisoning everything around you, and you’re afraid.

Oh, I know, I know. You cover your face to protect your identity because Antifa might come for you. You’re “protecting” yourself and your family from “leftist terrorism.”

Motherfucker, please.

You’re not a brave resistance fighter struggling against an oppressive government, afraid the jackbooted G-men will kick down your door. You are the fucking government.

You’re not hiding from a terrorist ring hunting you down. You’re hiding from the future. You’re afraid of what will happen to you after the regime falls. This is why you hide your faces. This is why you cover your badges. This is why you illegally change license plates after your little raids:

You’re afraid of facing the consequences of your actions because you know that this ride won’t last forever. That Donald Trump will not be president for much longer and without him, the 1000-Year Reich will fall.

You’re afraid of what happens next, and I am here to tell you: You should be.

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

The Ogre says "Be VERY afraid."

There’s this fun little nugget of history I learned recently. Something they didn’t teach in history class and doesn’t get mentioned much when we talk about what happened to the Nazis after World War II. Oh, we all know about the Nuremberg Trials, where a bunch of the worst of the worst were tried and executed. And I’m all about a new round of Nuremberg Trials. Big, showy tribunals for the leaders who directed the campaign of terrorism against the American people. The thieves who stole billions of OUR money. The traitors who worked with our enemies to weaken our nation.

But France and other countries went further than that, and this is what you’re really afraid of, even though you almost certainly are not aware of the history:

Immediately following Liberation France was swept by a wave of executions, public humiliations, assaults and detentions of suspected collaborators, known as the épuration sauvage (wild purge) or épurations extrajudiciaires (extrajudicial purges).

When the regime falls, and it will, there is going to be chaos. You will be cut loose immediately. ICE will be disbanded. Your badge, your title, your legal protection, all gone. And a lot of very angry people, all the people you abused and tortured and maimed and kidnapped and raped and the relatives of the people you killed? They’re going to come looking for you.

And if they don’t, the FBI will once it’s restored to working order. And if not the FBI, state Attorneys General will. Because no matter what fairy tales you tell yourself today, you know what you're doing is immoral and illegal and we will be coming for you.

If you’re lucky, someone with a badge will show up with handcuffs, and you’ll spend the next 15-25 years in a prison cell. If not, it will be a mob with guns and a rope looking for collaborators because that’s what you are: A collaborator.

You are willfully working for a corrupt fascist regime enacting an illegal white nationalist agenda. Shhhhhh…no one cares about your justifications. No one cares if you were “just following orders.” You could have refused. You could have upheld the law. The REAL law, not the white nationalist version Stephen Miller told you to enact.

But you didn’t. You covered your face and then smashed your way through immigrant communities, zip-tieing naked children in the middle of the night and kidnapping people exercising their First Amendment rights.

So, yeah, we’re going to come for you, one way or the other. That is why you cover your face.

Chances are, when the regime falls, you’re going to rush out and join the first white nationalist militia you can find, assuming you don’t already belong to one. An awful lot of you MAGA types have made it clear you do not believe in democracy and that you, and only you, have the divine right to rule America.

Cool.

Just to be clear, when you take up arms against the United States THIS time, it’s not going to be another January 6th. You’re not going to be rehabilitated and celebrated. You’re going to be put down like a rabid animal. Thus, to all traitors and collaborators, because again, and I cannot stress this enough, that is what you are: A collaborator. You will be forever branded as someone who betrayed their oath to serve the people of the United States and uphold the law.

You chose to indulge your deepest, darkest impulses. You chose violence and hate and rage. You chose fascism over democracy. You chose evil, no matter how hard you lied to yourself about being the hero.

There will be a price to pay, and that is why you hide. But you cannot hide forever. The regime is not smart enough to wipe all of the records, and we will find out who all of you are. Maybe you’ll have enough time to flee the country before we catch up to you. I hear Russia is always looking for able-bodied recruits. That’ll probably work out just fine for you.

Has to be better than the mob justice waiting at the end of a rope for siding with the fucking Nazis, right? Guess we’ll find out soon enough. Clock’s ticking. See you soon…“hero.”

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The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 10 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.